Blunt Trauma to the Head 

Hi there. I saw you from across the room. I couldn't help but notice you looking at me. And winking. What's that you're reading? Oh, I love Murakami! Yeah, I'm reading some of his short stories right now. No, I can't remember what they're called. No, I don't remember what any of them are about.

You have a Masters degree? So do I! Wow, we have so much—. Yes, so much in common. Look, we're already finishing each other's sentences.

Is that your dog? I love dogs. No, I'm not much of a cat person, either. They make me choke, actually.

Well, let me cut to the chase: you're looking for a smart, funny, sensitive guy, right? And I am a smart, funny sensitive guy. (To prove it, here's a picture of me in a bunny suit. Yes, it's me, playing the Easter Bunny at a charity breakfast for children. Yes, of course I do that sort of thing all the time.)

If you're looking for a smart, funny, sensitive guy, and I am one, then maybe we should meet? No, I mean meet. In real life. Yeah, offline—not email. Would you like to meet? No? OK. Well, I just thought—.

OK. See you around.

Inexplicable, Moving 

During a recent trip to the Guggenheim Museum, I decide I'm done with modernity. Whatever that means.¹

The Guggenheim was showing collection of photos from Central Europe—abstract explorations of shape and light, the rise of the machines and the fall of humanity (and all of those other Art Themes).

I've long considered myself a "purveyor of modernity," genuinely interested in all of those pretentious things they teach in art school about form and structure, about art as a forum for man to explore his relationships to the machine in all its incarnations (and everything else in our accelerated culture...). I'm good for nothing if not for appreciating modern art—the suburban white-boy version of Lee Dorsey: "Everything I do is gonna be Pomo." In other words, I'm an art snob. I actually like these things. Or thought I did, until this trip to the Guggenheim, which I found to be tiring. "Oh. Those old collages, catch-phrases, and abstract shapes, again?"

The museum's other exhibit was a collection of Richard Prince paintings and photos, which I found even more tiring: enormous clever paintings, and photos he'd taken of magazine ads. Ho hum. So much canvas, so little soul. ²

By the end of my visit, I felt as though I'd been walking uphill all day. ³

Exhausted, I returned home, ready to toss aside modernism and post-modernism, structuralism and post-structuralism, formalism and post-formalism, and anything I knew or thought I knew about art and aesthetics. All of it, top to bottom, left me cold.

Then I saw a block of light shining through a window onto my stairwell and it stopped me where I stood. I found it inexplicable, moving, and as expressive as the arcing arm in a Michelangelo. Expressive, and expressing what, I did not know.

Which was exactly what I loved about it. ⁴

1. This is a direct quote, of myself, to myself, when I asked myself what I thought of the photography on exhibit: "I think I'm done with modernity."

2. The exhibit was titled "Spiritual America." Whether the irony was intentional or accidental, it was ironic nonetheless. (And therefore post-modern.)

3. Ha ha.

4. These shapes made by angles, lights, and stairs seem integral to the design of the art museums themselves, and by far my favorite thing at the Guggenheim was the Guggenheim itself: I stood at the top of the long round ramp, looking down, realizing the probably-obvious: that the building was art; the shapes it made out of ramps and stairs and the resultant strange croppings of the paintings on the walls were art; that the people looking at the art (now framed in my view by the ramps and stairs) were art; and that I, looking at them while they looked up at me, I was art too.

The Shortest Days 

"You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés."
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Two months ago, in a seizure of optimism and despair, I quit my job. I felt guilty about it, because I loved my job; but I didn't feel that guilty: I recalled very clearly a conversation with my boss a year earlier: "I like to hire people who are interesting," he said, "and that means it's inevitable that at some point they move on."

According to one particular interpretation of this, then, in order to be interesting, I had no choice but to quit. ¹

I want to be interesting; ∴ I quit. ²

I went to Europe; I drank quite a bit; I became obsessed with sex; I've spent all my time talking, not working. I've hung around cafés.

I'm not sure, so far, that it's made me more interesting.

* * *

The cost of sleeping till 11am, or dallying around the house, is greater on these shortest days of the year: one begins craving lunch around sunset. Days of this go by, weeks—short days of doing nothing. I need more sleep now than any other time I can remember, and I wonder, am I recovering from some great fatigue? Am I exhausted from some otherwise-hard-to-see growth spurt (internal, emotional), sleeping off the exhaustion of a sea-change? Am I sick, depressed? Or just profoundly lazy?

Just wondering about these things costs me another hour, and the sun is already low in the sky.

* * *

An expatriate, of course, is someone who lives in a foreign country; but in its original usage, it implied an outcast, a person driven from their native land. The term is muddied in our present day, when nation-state boundaries are easy to cross, but community and kinship are elusive: what is the word for someone who fails ever to find compatriots, or a place called home? How does such a person not "lose touch with the soil"?

It is important to remember on these short dark, days: the sun also rises...

1. Was it not an option, I wonder now in retrospect, for him to make the workplace more interesting instead? I honestly think it probably wasn't an option, and insofar as it was one, he would have tried to do so, and did try.

2. I often wish the therefore sign were as easy to reach on my computer keyboard as the exclamation point (which I use less often).

Christopher is ... 

Only a very vain, very bored person would post a month's worth of Facebook "status updates" as a blog entry, as if it has literary (or any sort of) merit.¹

So, here's mine:

Thanks to the miracles of RSS, you could, if you so desired, subscribe to this "blog." There's no way I would know if you did—but still, I'd think a little less of you: it's just not that interesting...

1. There's a website called One Sentence that allows people to submit narratives of their days / weeks / lives with only one parameter: the story must be told in a single sentence, resulting in equal parts banality and poignancy.

That Guy 

When I wake up, I can't tell what's going on. It's dark and there's sharp thudding. After a few seconds, the morning snaps into better focus and I understand: it's that guy. That insomniac road crew guy who runs the jack-hammer. He's at it again.

As I sit up in bed, I feel vaguely like Roy Scheider, who, having vanquished the giant predatory shark in Jaws and then again in Jaws 2, sees his family flee from Hawaii to Florida, only to have the shark follow them, in Jaws 3-D, looking for revenge.

* * *

We first met in upstate New York: I lived in a sleepy college town, in one of those broken-down, overpopulated old clapboard houses that make up these towns—the kind where the walls are all crooked and the doors never quite line up, and rooms seem to have been haphazardly appended to the original structure till you can't tell what the original structure was, rooms just slapped on here and there so that the building resembles a hamster's Habitrail—even before one considers the rat's-nest decor of piled laundry and food containers that are the closest thing the house has to insulation. You know—one of those houses?

We lived a little ways off the road, but they were doing some work on a water line or sewer line or something, and that's how I met that guy.

That guy, that orange-vested guy with bulging triceps and a penchant for early rising, was an up-and-comer: he had everything it took to be a very successful jack-hammerer. And he knew it. Every morning he'd be up and coming right outside our window, hammering away into our driveway, into what felt like the foundation of the house, into what felt like my molars and my cranium, at 7am. 7am! No regard was given to the fact that we we'd been up all night working studying drinking and playing guitar. 7am, on the button, every morning. This guy was a German train. This guy was the Cal Ripkin of jack-hammerers.

The resulting lack of sleep led to more than half of the house coming down with mono.¹

There was no evidence to support the obvious theory—that guy enjoyed waking us each morning from our privileged (and often hung-over) sleep.

* * *

I didn't see that guy again for a few years: we drifted apart and went our separate ways, and I kind of forgot about him. Maybe I caught a glimpse of him in L.A., but I couldn't be sure, because the steep angle of the sun threw the shadow of the hard hat across his face, and all I saw for sure were his white teeth shining out from his gleaming sadistic 7am smile.

* * *

It's only natural, I guess, that we each wound up in Boston: it's an obvious destination for private contractors and for over-educated liberal arts grads. The entire city of Boston is always under construction, constantly.² Road crews are easier to find than T stops, and at least as prevalent as Dunkin Donuts.³

[Construction is the status quo in Boston, along with its evil twin, destruction. Put aside the exceptional example of the Big Dig and consider instead the thousands of smaller-scale fiascos: i.e., the entire time I was in Boston (so, two years) saw work on the Congress Street Bridge, a major passage across the Boston Channel into South Boston. Work started before I arrived and it goes on to this day. Construction in Boston is so common that you might never twice take the same route from one place to another: like the Hogwarts staircase, the road itself will bend and twist and reshape itself over time.]

That guy found me a week after I renewed my lease in Boston's South End. I had plenty of misgivings about signing on to another year of that apartment (in particular) and another year of Boston (in general), but I made some peace with these misgivings, and decided it was for the best that I stay. I inked the new lease and settled in for another year.

The wrecking ball showed up the following week, there to tear down the adjacent building and replace it a new set of luxury condos. Yes—wrecking ball. Since we'd first met in that sleepy college town, that guy had diversified: he was now adept in many new tools of noise and destruction, including (but not limited to) the pile driver, the bulldozer, the wrecking ball, and even explosives.

The amount of time it takes, apparently, to level an old building, clear the rubble, and then build, from the ground up, a new set of luxury condos is exactly one year—exactly the duration of the lease I'd just signed. They were just installing the windows when I drove my U-haul out of town.

I hope that guy forgives me for not saying goodbye.

* * *

From the window of my Brooklyn apartment, I can make him out, in his too-familiar hard hat and orange vest. He's surrounded by an army of rubber construction cones and he's blissfully jack-hammering away. Sitting there on the curb, off to one side, there's a coffee from Dunkin Donuts. Even from this distance, through the light rain and through the cement dust that rises up around him, through the shadow that the sun casts off of his hard hat, I can see his bright teeth smiling, as he hammers his way back into my day.

1. Or maybe it was all the kissing.

2. Given the number of liberal arts grads, it's probably under constant deconstruction as well.

3. It's completely possible the prevalence of Dunkin Donuts in Boston is a direct result of the prevalence of road crews, because you will never see one without the other.

Death in the Afternoon 

or, the Computer of Theseus

Today a loyal and stalwart friend of mine passed away. Before you start drafting your sympathy cards, I should clarify: this old friend of mine, who goes by the name "Agamemnon," is a computer. He's had a good full life and it was his time.

Still, I'm moved to write a few words.

I first met Agamemnon when I moved back to New York in 2002. We met on Canal Street, at one of those sketchy "Just Fell Off a Truck" electronics stores. I brought him home, opened him up, and took him apart. It was love at first sight.

He's hosted my music collection, my video collection, this website, and countless hours that I probably should have spent with people instead. He's reinvented himself more times than I have, with new parts, new software: when he finally gave up his last guttural whir this week, there wasn't a single original part in him; I'd replaced him piece by piece, so that this dead husk of plastic and metal is, in some ways, not even the same computer.

So this computer, which I named for the great bullish Greek king, in the end bore more resemblance to that ship of Theseus:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians..., for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

If you replace each broken part of the ship, piece by piece, as it falls into disrepair, until every single part has been replaced, then are you on the same ship or a different ship? And if you replace every last part of a computer while continuing to use it through all those years, is it the same computer?

These are the sort of questions I can ponder now that Agamemnon is gone (and with it, my music collection, my video collection, and many of my pastimes)...

Litmus Test 

Tomorrow will be:

than today.

Choose one.

Game Over 

When the course of human history is set, it's not usually set by fat guys in bad t-shirts who spend all their time playing videogames. Therefore I imagine it'll come off as a tad hyperbolic when I say that this week, a crack was revealed in the foundation of Western civilization, when media company CNET fired Jeff Gerstmann, the senior editor of its videogame publication, GameSpot.com.

The reasons behind the ouster are shrouded in the rhetoric of corporate obfuscation: "It is CNET Networks' policy not to comment on the status of its employees, current of former." But actions speak louder than words, and here are four:

1. Game publisher Eidos buys huge blocks of advertising on CNET sites, leading up to the release of its anticipated shooter, Kane and Lynch
2. Gerstmann posts an unfavorable review of the game, saying "It's weighed down by bad storytelling, a real lack of character development, and a host of gameplay-related issues."
3. Gerstmann, 10-year editor with GameSpot, is locked out of his office and CNET won't say why, leaving the rest of the editorial staff feeling "devastated, gutted and demoralized."
4. Gerstmann's video review, and the Eidos ads, are removed from the CNET sites.

Maybe CNET responded to the pressure of an advertiser when it fired Gerstmann or maybe it was an unlucky coincidence of events. But the insinuation alone is enough to compromise CNET's editorial integrity, forcing readers to re-think every favorable review ever posted by the publisher, and if they're wise, to re-think every article written by every ad-driven or sales-driven publication in the market (which is to say, nearly all of them). ¹

The idea that CNET might kowtow to advertisers (like the idea that Rupert Murdoch might use the Wall Street Journal for less-than-objective ends) begs a question that can't be asked often or loudly enough: in a wholly capitalist society, when publications answer to shareholders and profit margins, why wouldn't they kowtow?, and is there any status at all left for the Fourth Estate? ²

1. In the midst of this controversy, Eidos was also caught fabricating reviews of the game on their own site. Who needs the press, when the publisher can review their own product?

2. Chuck Klosterman (of whom The Urban Sherpa is an avowed fanboy) wrote this article, suggesting that there will never be an "authoritative critical voice within the world of video games" because "absolutely everything is built around consumerism."

Dynamite! 

If it weren't already completely clear that Hillary Clinton is the heir apparent to the Oval Office, it became a little more so yesterday, when she became the candidate to blow up: a man walked into her New Hampshire campaign office with sticks of what appeared to be dynamite strapped to his chest.

The fact that the crazies are coming at her elevates her to the next tier of legitimacy. Consider: Mark David Chapman did not shoot one of The Monkees, and John Hinkley Jr. didn't shoot Dan Quayle. No one tried to explode Joe Biden's campaign headquarters. Welcome to the big league, Hill.

(It's good to know that, five weeks before the New Hampshire primary, someone cares about the upcoming presidential election—even if it is just a drunk in search of mental health care.)

The other candidates must be jealous of the extra attention Clinton received, thanks to this bona fide, uninvited crisis in the midst of a campaign that has otherwise been maybe too orchestrated. In the end, the dynamite wasn't real—but Hillary was.

"It looked and sounded presidential," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "This was an instance of the White House experience of this campaign. They knew how to handle this."

And just after reports that her lead was slipping. Of course, just because the Clinton camp stood to gain from the crisis is not to suggest they might have staged it. No one is that Machiavellian. Right?

Just don't blow it, Hill.

Incontrovertible Proof of the Existence of God  

God exists and I can prove it.

My proof is simple, elegant and easy to verify. It shows God is benevolent, and has engineered our world with intelligent design.

Spaghetti squash. You cook it, run a fork through it, and it turns into pasta—but healthy!

(Thank God.)

Smudge Stick 

You're feeling a bit out of place for some reason, but not in a bad way. Now is a good time to sit back and think about what the future holds—and how you can shift the odds in your favor. (Pisces horoscope, week of November 26)

"Christopher is wondering what comes next."

So reads the status line of my new Facebook profile, which I'm staring at from the computer in what was, until a week ago, the home office I used to telecommute for a Boston-based Internet shop. But I worked my last day a week ago, and now I don't know what to call this room, or how to use it.

I came into this room to smudge it clean, figuratively if not literally. But after clearing my desk, I feel leaden, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Instead, I stare at the computer screen, looking for inspiration, and when it doesn't come, I switch back to Facebook to play a game of Scrabble. Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life.

O brave new world.

* * *

Over the course of the week, I watch the flow of my email inbox trickle almost to nothing. It's typical: after applying some significant effort toward removing myself from the world, then I feel disappointment to be so quickly and easily forgotten. When I'm surrounded by people and their expectations, I want to retreat to a hermitage; and once I've achieved it, once I'm safely inside a hermetic seal, then I miss being at the center of things, and wonder why I'm so alone.

* * *

Hermetic. 1. Pertaining to the Greek god, Hermes. 2. Relating to or dealing with occult science, esp. alchemy; magical; alchemical. hermetic art, philosophy, science: names for alchemy or chemistry. Also, unaffected by external influences, recondite.

Alchemy, the science of transformation, dedicated to turning lead to gold.

Another week has gone by. I feel leaden, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Instead, I stare at the computer screen, looking for inspiration, and when it doesn't come, I switch back to Facebook, and read another horoscope. Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life.

"Christopher is wondering what comes next."

My Bad Taste 

Part One: Trooper

I grew up in a town called Trooper, served by the post office of a larger, neighboring town called Norristown. But these are both ugly names, so as I was growing up, whenever I wrote out my address, I listed the small town next to us in the other direction, Audubon, because I found it more aesthetically pleasing. I don't know if my edit frustrated the postman, or if it ever caused me to lose mail—and I never cared, because it still seemed better to lose mail than to have to write words like "Trooper" or "Norristown" on an envelope.

That is the kind of person you're dealing with.

I never wanted to be associated with a place that had such bad sense to name towns Trooper or Norristown, or a place whose idea of a good painter was John James Audubon. Such a place is not a place with good taste, and I've always hated that about it. You could say that by making this little edit on my outgoing envelopes, I was trying to leave my home town long before I actually packed my bags and actually left.

But you can't change where you're from.

This weekend I'm on my way back to Norristown. I'm looking at a SEPTA train full of people with bad taste, and maybe for the first time in my life, I'm realizing I'm one of them. I'm realizing part of me never actually left.

Part Two: Music History

The first record I ever bought, at age ten, was "I Love Rock'n'Roll", by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. It was a single, and I also had to buy a yellow plastic "spider" to put in the center of the record, so it would play on my dad's stereo.

The first album I ever bought was a mix cassette of 80s singles, the kind they advertise on TV as being "Not available in stores," though somehow I bought it at K-Mart. The album opened with "Don't You Want Me Baby" by The Human League, and included tracks by Foreigner and Huey Lewis and News. ¹

The first important album I ever bought was Motley Crue's Shout at the Devil, important because I bought it on account of our seventh grade class president liking it: I bought it to feel cool. The album looked Satanic and I felt I should listen to it in secret, without my parents learning of it—so in a sense, this was the beginning of my adolescence. ²

By the end of eighth grade, in some (very small) circles I was considered an arbiter of good taste, because of my extensive knowledge of the classic and pop rock canons. Within the first few notes, I could reliably "Name That Tune" from among a vast set of music by Bad Company, Bryan Adams, and Bon Jovi. ³ From this mostly useless skill I took great pride, and used every chance I had to show off, in public, just what a geek I was.

This is the kind of person you're dealing with.

Part Three: Snobbish Monsters

At some point in the midst of overpriced private education, I realized that what I was buying was a chance at better taste. ⁴ I surrounded myself with aesthetes and snobs, and to help fit in, I made the required changes to my music collection (and everything else).

Only in retrospect did I notice we are all in the midst of the same transition, trying to emulate one another while trying to change ourselves: none of us realized that the benchmark was moving.

Only in retrospect did I see that our parents had wanted us to have more opportunities than they did, and better ones—and in offering us those opportunities they wound up creating snobbish monsters in place of their children, snobbish monsters who would go on to make them feel bad about their own taste, and then try and parse the entire experience into an essay or a blog entry while playing the music of their childhood in a playlist that might or might not be ironic, might or might not be "good"—and the snobbish monster can't even tell anymore what is good, and what isn't...

1. I still like many of the songs from this album and I still listen to some of them.

2. I still like the title song from this album and I still listen to it.

3. I can honestly say I don't like most of these songs now, and with very rare exception, i.e., "Living on a Prayer," I do not listen to them. But I'm listening to "Living on a Prayer" right now.

4. Since I went to college to study aesthetics, I have to assume I was aware of all of this even at time.

Clutter and Kindness 

Or, Home / Away From Home, pt. 3

After all anybody is as their land and air is.
Anybody is as the sky is low or high,
the air heavy or clear,
and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there.
It is that which makes them and the arts they make,
and the work they do and the way they eat
and the way they drink
and the way they learn and everything.
- Gertrude Stein

The clutter at my parents' house is fantastic; there's not a single bit of surface area that hasn't been piled twice over. I find it overwhelming beyond comprehension: it creates a kind of spatial white noise that shuts down my brain. I wish for an archeologist to uncover everything, to catalog each item and reveal a kind of understanding of the whole based on the parts: just this one room where I sleep is stratified with needlepoint, scented candles, framed family photos stacked on top of one another, mystery novels, sewing magazines, antique dolls, half-hearted religious icons, sewing magazines, a South American death mask, VHS tapes, Rubbermaid storage containers, reams of polyester, Kokopelli, unused semi-disposable cookbooks, three-inch-thick photo albums, a case of printer toner, prescription medication, souvenir keychains, last year's still-wrapped Christmas tree ornaments, packets of salad dressing mix, clipped coupons, mail order catalogs, the cardboard boxes of year-old appliances, and miraculously, no dust. It's a palimpsest I'll never be able to read; potsherds beyond systematizing: all I find here is clutter. Clutter and kindness.

The opposite of unfettered is "home."

Emergency Preparedness 

MP3 audio track

I hear the chirp from a policeman's walkie talkie outside my window, and see a small group of them (gaggle? pack?) standing next to my apartment. And a fire truck. I can't tell what's going on and I wonder if I should be prepared to evacuate—which right now I'm not, because I'm sitting here in a towel and nothing else. I've been sitting here in this towel since I got out of the shower a half-hour ago; and I was in the shower at least a half-hour (so warm!)—which makes me realize that when the time comes to evacuate the building, whenever that is (and that time always comes, sooner or later), the odds are pretty good that I will be horribly unprepared, and quite possibly naked.

It all reminds me of the time I was evacuated from my apartment, after the building sort of exploded.

I woke that morning to an enormous thud that shook the walls of the Lido Apartments, where I lived at the time. The Lido was a relic from old Hollywood, a once-glamorous hotel turned into a five-story brick slum with aspirations to gentrify. Typical rising and falling of Hollywood dreams. ¹

On this morning something shook the building hard. This by itself wasn't too unusual, it being earthquake country; but this was a different kind of shake—not the slow, growling rumble of an earthquake; more like someone had driven a truck straight into the building. A big truck.

I poked my head out my window to see what was going on, and saw everyone else in my neighborhood doing the same—a hundred sleepy faces dangling outside a hundred windows. I thought of Whac-a-Mole. Then I remember thinking something bad was happening, something possibly disastrous or epic. ² I remember thinking I should throw some clothes on and leave the building.

Instead, seeing nothing, I decided to go back to bed.

[When the time comes to evacuate the building, whenever that is (and that time always comes, sooner or later), the odds are pretty good that I will be horribly unprepared, and quite possibly naked.]

The firemen banging on the door shouted, We needed to get out "NOW NOW NOW." But I couldn't get out, because there were four of them standing in the doorway, and they were the biggest, widest, thickest people I've ever seen. So instead I grabbed some essentials—my laptop, some chewing gum—and waited for them to disperse.

Out on the street, the longest line of fire trucks ever assembled stretched from horizon to horizon (or at least up Wilcox to Cahuenga, and down to Hollywood Boulevard). Helicopters swarmed the sky, and police held curious passersby behind yellow "Do Not Cross" tape. I strolled through it casually, weirdly unbothered, almost dissociated. I declined a TV interview and instead made a beeline for Mann's Chinese Theatre. I watched Blade II (which really was bad, a disaster of epic proportions), and wondered, every now and then, if I'd have an apartment when the movie was over, and if I should have brought, I don't know, a change of underwear or at least a jacket.

I learned the full story when I got out of the theatre: a few people had seen my building on the morning news ³ and called to see if I was OK, and I pieced together the details from their string of voicemail messages. An underground had fire spread to a natural gas line, causing a muffled explosion that blew off the manhole covers all around my block: this was the initial thud. But it turned out that my building also sat on top of a major intersection of gas mains, and if the fire had spread, it'd have blown that entire part of the neighborhood sky high. Boulevard of broken dreams.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is. Maybe take short showers and don't sit around in your wet towel too long. Or maybe just that some people never learn.

1. The Lido was best known as the location for the lobby shots of the Eagles "Hotel California." My own favorite thing about the Lido, apart from its location and dirt-cheap rent, was the view it afforded to the luxury condos across the parking lot. Forty-eight windows shaped like wide-screen TVs faced toward my apartment, like forty-eight channels of television, and without fail, two or three of them featured women taking their clothes off and dancing. No one ever believes me about the dancing, but it's true. This was, after all, Los Angeles.

2. I can't remember for sure whether this was just before, or just after, September 11. I'm going to say it was just after, because that makes a better story. And maybe accurate.

3. Who in L.A. watches the morning news? Or any news?

Chicken Soup 

or, Chickens, Part Three

Chicken soup is a food we only eat when we're sick, which means it's a food we can never quite taste when we eat it.

So it's possible we don't really know what it tastes like.

While making chicken soup today, I realize I've never had what I'd think of as good chicken soup, or tasty chicken soup—so my criteria, as I'm adding ingredients and trying to decide whether or not it's complete, is simply how much or how little my soup, made of all fresh ingredients, tastes like it's the soup from a can.

Rejected Transplant / Phantom Limb 

When I try and introduce someone or something new into my life, it's as if my body (or psyche) rejects them like the artificial graft of a transplanted organ. Something in me, something deep down, rejects the concept of this new body as alien.

When I try and remove someone or something old from my life, it's as if my body (or psyche) refuses to let go, continues to acknowledge their presence despite their absence, a phantom limb.

What Would Jason Do? 

Walking by the Gare de L'Est on my way out of Paris, I got a sense of déjà vu ¹—and realized something that eluded me the whole time I'd been there:

I want to be Jason Bourne.

Sure, Jason Bourne—the amnesiac assassin played, in a trio of recent movies, by Matt Damon—is a stone killer, as liable to murder a man with a paperback book as with a knife, gun, or his own well-trained hands. But still... this corn-fed, athletic, Midwestern ex-pat boy is a role model for Americans everywhere.

1. He lives in Paris. That's cool.
2. He is fluent in no fewer than six languages (French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and English), and has no xenophobia about relating to people from outside the United States.
3. He can handle a Mini Cooper like a NASCAR driver.
4. He has great taste in women.
5. He can run really really fast.
6. He's adept at picking up new skills and new technologies.

Last, and I'm sure most important: despite his first-hand knowledge of the terrors that beset the world, Jason Bourne has a conscience. He knows right from wrong, and acts accordingly—even when it flies in the face of his own government's position. He knows, for instance, that water-boarding is torture (having himself been subjected to it by the CIA).

Bourne is smart, no doubt, but he's no brooding liberal either: he's a military man driven to action by the un-American activities of his own government. Bourne proves out that you don't have to be a fan of Bill O'Reilly to be patriotic.

1. Which is, itself, French: "already seen". And related to amnesia...

Astrological Ashram 

I spend the morning reading blogs much better than mine—a consequence of reconnecting with some old writer-friends (all presumably out of work at the moment, with nothing to do, then, but blog...)—and a mixed consequence, because, well, yes, my morning reading is much improved, but also, Why can't I write like that?

Then I retreat into astrology sites for another two hours. Sure they're silly, but I find them comforting because they answer my prior question: I can't write like that because I'm cosmologically predisposed to be exactly what I am (which is, and I quote: "Escapist and idealistic. Secretive and vague. Weak-willed and easily led.") Thanks for that. What a relief.

I hide in these sites and take comfort from their pre-canned answers: They get me. And when's the last time anybody got me?

(Careful, it's a trick question—because the elephant in the astrological house is why I've been hiding, and what I'm retreating from—a subject I've avoided with aplomb these last few weeks, despite recently posting so. many. words. )

* * *

"As the last sign of the zodiac, you are in conflict with yourself, as your symbol suggests--two fish locked in tension, forever pulling each other in opposite directions. This can represent the personality tied to the soul, and indeed one seems to be swallowing the other. Your motto is either serve, or suffer. And if you lean more toward the spiritual side, your rewards are huge, for you are the most sensitive and psychic sign in the horoscope."

* * *

[Her hair is everywhere. I keep finding it. I'm a clean person—I sweep, I mop, I do laundry. But the hair persists. I can't get rid of it. The other night I woke up and found myself literally tangled up in it, like it's some living creature from an over-sentimental B-horror movie, a metaphor brought to life. The irony being she hasn't been here in weeks; she was barely here at all.

Her hair, on the other hand, won't leave. It has a will of its own.

I have to give serious consideration to whether I'm hallucinating. I don't think I am. But you never do....]

* * *

Last evasion for the morning: I disappear an hour into a book of poetry. (Oh so Piscean!) I'm amazed every time how, while reading, I can feel my spirit soar—but, to where? I put the book down only to find I've simply smacked against the ceiling. I'm right back where I started, or maybe worse, since it's already afternoon. "If a man understands a poem, he shall have troubles."

It's time to get on with my day. Consolation, if it's anywhere, is somewhere outside of this astrological ashram. The psychics take one last parting shot, as I eat lunch, via a fortune cookie: "Your dearest wish will come true."

Sure. Sure it will. If only I can figure out what it is.

Hip-Hop Gandhi and the End of Time 

or, The Internet is Evil, Part Two

Regular waking life is alright—some interesting things happen there—but the maybe-sad fact is that some of my most powerful experiences happen to me while I'm sleeping. The day I got back from Paris, I fell into my much-missed memory foam mattress and had an intense, frightening dream (which I promise I'll describe here briefly, partly because dreams are boring, and partly because I've forgotten most of it):

Walking through the city one night (a city that looked more like Blade Runner than Brooklyn), I ran into a dear friend of mine on the street. He'd lost a terrible amount of weight. He looked brittle; and despite the winter cold, he was wearing only a thin lungi, and an iPod (from which I could hear the new Jay-Z album):

In the years since I'd seen him, my beefy boyish friend had transformed into a sick, hip-hop Gandhi.

He picked himself up on expiring legs, and grabbed me with his bony hands. His arms were so thin I could have wrapped a finger around one. He looked at me with big wise cow eyes, and said, "Chris! Chris! I'm so glad I found you. I've been looking for you for a long time."

I held him up on his useless legs while he caught his breath. "You need to find them!," he continued.

"Find who?"

At this, he laughed a strange Gandhi. laugh, to tell me that I was asking a ridiculous, simple thing. "Everyone. You need to find everyone you've lost. While there's time!"

He smiled, relieved to have delivered his message, and then he died in my arms.

I woke up. It was still dark, and because I'd left a window open, it was freezing. I felt terrible, and restless, and confused. And this dream is the only reason I can think that, after resisting for so long, I finally joined Facebook today.

Facebook: in more ways than one, it truly is the end of time...

On the Veranda 

Part of her thought if she'd been able to just let go, the sheaves of renderings would have built themselves, harvest come home. Another delusion, no doubt. She knew she'd been grandiose, and didn't have much to show for it. She had committed that most American of sins: failed to move laterally.

- from Bruce Wagner's Memorial

It's going to be another one of those days, by which I mean frustrating. I'm staring at the computer screen, hitting "Refresh" every thirty seconds or so—as if inspiration of any sort ever comes via the Internet.

Sure. If I hit "Refresh" just this one more time, all my problems will be solved. My Inbox will suddenly overflow with love, affection, opportunity, wealth, challenges, self-confidence, and the answers to all my still-unarticulated questions. That's going to happen. (I mean, how big would that attachment have to be, exactly?)

I hit "Refresh." And when I'm not "Refreshing," I'm typing, using similar (if slightly better-founded) logic: that if only I keep typing—spewing words as fast as they pop into my head—then eventually, like the monkey at the keyboard, eventually, I'll have to stumble on to some wisdom.

And eventually, maybe I will.

But I'm not sure it's going to happen today.

* * *

My Zen archery teacher (yes, I had a Zen archery teacher) would talk about the importance, in Japanese architecture, of the veranda. Because of his pronunciation, vee-lan-da, it took me ridiculously long to realize what he meant. Actually, it took me ridiculously long to realize what he meant, because teaching Zen archery (kyudo) to a Westerner is a somewhat futile exercise. We harbor B-movie samurai fantasies about shooting things—but kyudo has almost nothing to do with shooting, or even bows, arrows, or targets. Rather, the study of kyudo is a kind of brain-washing through storytelling—and the bow is nothing but a set of stories, which, if used properly, might break some entrenched habits, and replace them with new ones.

In kyudo, you don't pull the bow string. You open the bow.

In kyudo, you don't shoot the arrow. While opening the bow, the arrow will release.

In kyudo, there is no target. (The word we used for "target" means "that fuzzy faraway thing.") An arrow might hit the ceiling and still have been the result of an excellent shot, depending on how it was released. In self-help parlance: you are the target.

All you have to do is let go.

* * *

A veranda is a space in between—neither inside not outside, neither here nor there. When you have left a place and have not yet arrived at the new place, you are on the veranda.

In my culture, in Western culture, we are encouraged to move quickly from one place to another, always to be on our way ... somewhere. We are encouraged to aim for a target, and to hit it, and if we do this, we have made a "good shot."

But in kyudo, the ceilings of the verandas are littered with arrows that strayed very far from that fuzzy faraway place called the "target". In kyudo, one is encouraged to take off one's shoes, kneel down on the veranda, and contemplate the path of these arrows, each of which might have been a "good shot."

Sometimes it's a good shot, even if it fails to move laterally. Sometimes you have to stay on the veranda, and be patient, so that you can know where to go next. Sometimes you have to let go.

Inverse Spring Cleaning 

My parents came up this weekend. A three-hour drive up, a ninety-minute brunch, and then a three-hour drive back.

They're the sweetest people in the world.

I don't know for sure, but I think their biggest reason for coming up was because they had my winter coat. They knew winter was coming, and they didn't want me to get cold. That's right: I use them as a storage depot, and in return, they treat me like an object of affection and care. (They didn't even think I'd be here—they thought I was still in Paris—but wanted to make sure I had my winter coat when I got back.)

Have I mentioned they're the sweetest people in the world?

The coat came in the biggest duffel bag ever made, Hagrid's duffel bag, and it was full to bursting with all my winter things—sweaters, wool socks, flannel sheets, the aforementioned coat. From the look of the contents of this bag, you'd think I lived in a cabin in Saskatoon.

There was no way that such an influx of cotton and wool was not going to affect the status quo of my closet. So, since their visit, I've been engaged in inverse spring cleaning—the removal, washing, re-folding, re-sorting, and replacing of every single thing I own. Bushels of laundry. I've found a tee-shirt from high school, a camisole that belonged to my college girlfriend (before I knew the word "camisole"), clothes that have shrunken irreparably (or maybe it's not that the clothes have gotten smaller...)

Spring cleaning: it's not just for spring anymore. Going through one's entire wardrobe has to be the most clarifying feeling in the world: the enema of the closet. There should be a word for that. There probably is.

Paris 

Packing

I nearly missed the plane.

I'd been "packing" for three days, by which I mean I'd been thinking about packing, and that morning even going so far as to throw an assortment of clothes and hair products onto my bed. But not into a bag. I thought the flight left at 3pm but it was actually 2pm—something I learned at 1pm. So after three days of thinking of packing, the actual act happened in about three minutes. And I was off. Off to Paris.

Phantom Ringing

At first, the hardest thing was detoxing from all the über-comm. Vacation is a departure from normal, and "normal" for me had meant, lately, the constant email, the surfing, the IM, the SMS, the BlackBerry. The connection. "Only connect." But for this trip I was leaving it all behind. If it required electricity, it had no place on this vacation.

For days, I felt the phantom ringing of my absent BlackBerry in my right pocket—vibrations without cause. The device itself was switched off and sitting on my bedside table in Brooklyn, 3500 miles away.

"Only disconnect."

Backpacking

I vacation badly—alone and without much itinerary—so a lot of time gets wasted and when I do find something to enjoy, I can only share it with my notebook. Even in urban destinations, I sling a bag with food, water, and a map, and I hike. And hike and hike and hike. I take little breaks, sips of water, a PowerBar. That first day in Paris, jet-lagged and on no sleep at all, I walked straight through from 5am till 7pm, walked the full extent of my Streetwise® Paris map, because I felt I needed to "orient" myself before I could possibly enjoy myself.

I vacation like a backpacker (but without a compass).

[A friend tells me, "I think the compass needle is going to spin a lot in the next few months for you."]

Quel Chemin?

It's easy to forget: while visiting Paris, we tourists visit the Louvre, the Orsay, the Cluny, the Pompidou. But we don't want to see the Louvre, the Orsay, the Cluny, the Pompidou. We want to see Paris. Which way to Paris?

Nabakov: "The dull mad fact is that it does exist somewhere."

Tourism ushers us on a conveyor belt from one protected place to another, insulating us from the random or the sublime. But at 10am, in a room inside the Louvre full of gilded gold clocks from the 18th century, they each begin to chime, one, then another, then another. Each is encased in glass, and the room is filled with the muffled chimes of clocks built for kings, dead two-hundred fifty years. The moment—purely accidental, perfectly sublime. Welcome to Paris.

Sans Fromage

Someone I meet in Paris says, upon discovering my condition: "I have another friend who is lactose intolerant, and the entire time he was in Paris, he spent on the toilet..."

For my own protection, I start avoiding patisseries, cafes and boulangeries,with their butters, creams and fromage, and instead head to the supermarket. (Nothing says "I'm on vacation in France" better than grocery store hummus and dry rye crackers...)

When I get to the front of the line, the checkout girl scowls at my French, and then reaches into my hand to recount the change I'd given her: she corrected my grammar and my math. I leave the marché sans fromage, sans ego.

The World is Spinning

I check my email but none of it sinks in. It all feels thousands of miles away. Then I realize it (it being my life) is thousands of miles away.

Nabakov: "The dull mad fact is that it does exist somewhere."

Paris is a good town for the dead. Monuments at every intersection. Plaques mark the walls where resistance fighters died. The crypts and cemeteries are tourist hotspots. I'm in Montparnasse on Toussaint, All Saint's Day, tripping over the tombstones of Sartre, Baudelaire, Cortazar. A week ago none of this had anything to do with me, and today it's my life. It being my life.

Cortazar: "Just because the world is spinning 25,000 miles an hour, there is no reason to get dizzy."

Meetings at Fountains

A few days in a row I'm scheduled to rendezvous with people at fountains. Till yesterday, I don't know if I'd ever met at a fountain. I don't know if I could name a single fountain in New York or Boston or Los Angeles.

(On some meridian, this place is the polar opposite of Los Angeles: here nothing is less than two-hundred years old; there everything—even architecture—has a "use-by" date. I'd never say, "Meet me at the Fontaine St. Michel," but instead, "Meet me at The Gap in the Beverly Center.")

While I'm waiting by the fountain, a woman keeps looking at me and smiling. I can't tell—is it friendly? Flirty? Is she intrigued? Or am I somehow silly? God, I'd love to be here with vocabulary! When I finally stand up from where I'm sitting, she and her friends swoop in to take my seat. That's all she wanted. Now she's lost interest altogether. And I notice my butt is soaked, too.

L'Orange

Does this orange taste better
because it is a Parisian orange
(or because I am hungry)?

Regret

My longest single French conversation happened while waiting in line outside the Notre Dame cathedral. The line was long but moving quickly. It was flanked on both sides by beggars who ran a whole gamut of disabilities—blindness, amputation, disease. There was also a small swarm of vendors hawking chincy keychains shaped like the Eiffel Tower, six for €2. The conversation went like this:

Vendor: Six for €2.
Chris: Six? Porque six?!?
Vendor: C'est porque. Voulez-vous?

Why would anyone need six keychains? I spent my whole time in the cathedral laughing. How dumb do they think we (American tourists) are?!?

As I left the cathedral, I realized those keychains would make great stocking-stuffer gifts for my whole family. Six for €2 was a great bargain. J'ai voulu six.

But now, the urchins were nowhere to be found. The place had been cleared out. No one was selling anything. A lone woman played her violin, and a small crowd listened, and clapped.

The Dull Mad Fact

I'm late (again) heading to the airport—but for some reason I take the time to jot this inane haiku on my hotel stationary:

The end of the trip.
Is it sadness I feel, or
is it just fatigue?

Did I get everything out of the trip I intended? (What did I intend?) Did I find what I was looking for? (What was I looking for?)

My friend tells me, on my way out, I seemed "bien dans ta peau"—comfortable in my skin. (Clichés always sound less cliché in another language...) I suppose that is what I was looking for. I suppose I did find it. It does exist somewhere...

Welcome to Paris.

Things to Do in Paris When You're Dead  

"Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre." - Aldous Huxley

I haven't been myself lately—and by lately, maybe I mean the last couple of years. I've felt "absolutely devoid of savoir vivre." It reached a critical point a few weeks ago, and as an emergency effort to resuscitate the patient (myself), I got it in my head that I should go to the place where savoir vivre was invented: Paris, France.

In my escapist fantasy, I was going to follow in the footsteps of Henry Miller: quit my job at the proverbial telegraph office (or, in my case, the Internet office), hop on a sudden flight with a one-way ticket bought at the eleventh hour, and ... see what happened next.

For better or worse, I discovered I'd lost my passport, and had to get a new one: I was forced to proceed a little more moderately. Ça ne fait rien. So now, I'm going to France with a return ticket, and a little bit of my own joie de vivre, in my pocket. (I found a bit of it lying around, stored away in some places I'd forgotten.) A plain old normal vacation to a place I've never been, and a whole wonderful wishlist of things I want to do while I'm there.

Who knows? I might even come back.

Au revoir.

Unusual Cognition 

or, Voices in the Noise

I read a scientific study on the Internet that claimed "Hearing 'Messages' Embedded In Noise Could Be An Early Sign Of Schizophrenia." And it's the Internet so it must be true. So I've been listening to a lot of static lately, you know, just to be sure. To see if I hear voices. I don't think I do, but it's hard to be sure...

I've also been listening to this singer named Pete Galub, who played some sort of atonal alt-country rock opera at Magnetic Fields the other night. I don't really know what those scientists meant when they said "noise": one man's noise is another man's symphony. Some of Pete Galub's stuff was pretty noisy. And I definitely heard voices. But I loved it: if this is schizophrenia, it's not so bad.

The words people hear inside the noise, which indicate that they're crazy, are "increase," "children," "A-OK," and "Republican." These are words I hear pretty often (except maybe "A-OK").

I read another scientific study on the Internet that claimed schizophrenics get all kinds of tail. And it's the Internet so it must be true. People find schizophrenics sexy on account of their "unusual cognition." They find them sexy and this leads to an "increase" in "children," "A-OK"?

I can only speculate why schizophrenics hear the word "Republican" in the noise.

But I did read something on the Internet about this today, which claimed George Bush is a psychotic who should be put in a straightjacket. (In order to commit someone to a mental institution against their will, you have to prove they are a danger to themselves or others...) It was on the Internet, so I guess that means it's true. But then, the Internet is just another kind of noise, and these are just the voices I'm hearing...

Don't Quit Your Day Job  

Some of you may have noticed, from the scattered images over the last couple of weeks, that I've taken up painting and I'm terrible at it. I did this at the ten-year-old urging of a painter-friend of mine, and also because generally, I'm trying to do more and more things that I'm terrible at.

(So far recently, I think I've been a great success at being terrible.)

Let me make the job of future curators easy, and name this current period of my oeuvre: "The Paint She Be Misbehavin'." It's too thin, too thick, too crooked. My brain tells my hand to move the brush one way, and the paint winds up somewhere else.

My painting so far is the kind of work that inspires comments like, "Don't quit your day job." Trouble is, I did quit my day job—mostly so I could set aside a little time to paint, and to be terrible.

It's really wonderful, so far, being terrible...

10 Acrylic Painting Tips for Beginners

Caution Curves 

There must be a word for that sudden, inexplicable urge to drive your car into a telephone pole. You know the urge I mean. (I hope it's not just me...): you're driving on a perfectly safe stretch of road, having a completely unremarkable, maybe even happy day—till a little devil on your shoulder tells you to flick the wheel hard to the left, into oncoming traffic, a telephone pole or off a cliff.

You don't do it, of course. There's a half-second pause between the thought popping into your head, and your acting on that impulse—and that's enough time for you to realize it'd be a really stupid idea. It's enough time to stop yourself.

Usually.

Hopefully.

Even if you do manage to stop yourself (and if you're reading this, I assume that you've always managed to stop yourself), still there's a subsequent adrenaline rush, when you realize how thin the line is between an idea and an action; between thinking of driving off the cliff, and driving off the cliff; between a blissful, unremarkable day on a country road, and a life-altering collision of your own making.

* * *

Mothers, lock up your daughters, and drivers, lock up your cars: the devil on my shoulder is loud and insistent, and lately, in many aspects of my life, I'm pulling the wheel hard to the left. I'm making irrevocable and maybe irrational decisions.

Why? I'm not sure I could say. The road was too straight, too smooth. It was too easy to see where it was going. It wasn't going anywhere.

Or, ...

The devil made me do it.

* * *

There's another, similar siren call I've always found hard to resist—the call of mountain roads. Too many nights I've hurtled a car recklessly up and down the hairpins of Mulholland Drive, defying gravity to pull me off. I'd drive so hard it'd make me sweat, knowing anything—a bump in the road, gravel, a deer, (a pedestrian) could be the difference between living and dying.

What I've never been able to explain: it's not a death wish that drives me to be so reckless. It is absolutely not a wish to die.

It's a wish to live. A wish to be alive and to feel it.

There must be a word for that.

Savasana is Hard (pt. 2) 

My yoga teacher walks around the class, correcting people's postures. She stops next to my mat, watches, and finally says, "You're very flexible!"

I'm beaming. I've gotten the teacher's stamp of approval. I've gotten a star on the refrigerator.

Then I notice she's frowning.

"You're very flexible," she repeats. "That's probably why you get hurt so often. You're so flexible you never bothered to build up any core strength. You should work on that."

Yes I should.

Experiments in Magnetic Poetry (pt. 3) 

Probably the last in the series: it feels like I'm running low on magnets...

Warning Signs: Lost at Sea 

Delta

Juliet

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. 

This entry is not currently available.

Other Urban Sherpas 

This entry is not currently available.

Horse 

horse. Noun. The most majestic enormous thing we're allowed to touch.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Alt-Country 

alt-country. "Lost my job, my house, my truck. Got new ones."

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Savasana is Hard 

To yoga's uninitiated (and despite my best efforts, I'll count myself among them), the practice of yoga is about contorting the body into awkward positions with funny names, so as to inflict so much searing intensity upon your limbs that it shuts out the ceaseless chatter of the brain.

That's it, in a nutshell: there's not much use for ambiguous worry or angsty self-doubt when you're upside-down, lifting your too-heavy body against its own crushing weight, taking inventory of a whole set of muscles in your back that you never knew you had, all while trying to breathe (something you absolutely cannot take for granted in these moments...).

One of the simplest truths of yoga is that there's no room for worrisome psychology when you think you're about to pop a hamstring.

Yoga—even the crude version I'm describing—is hard. It's easy then to conclude that yoga classes finish with "resting poses" as a reward: "Thanks for all your hard work, and for sacrificing all of your brittle neglected muscle fiber. Lie back and relax. You've earned it." The yoga teacher will dim the lights and, in a most lulling voice, coax you to lay back, and "release into the floor."

This is savasana, "corpse pose." Pretend-you're-dead pose. Hold on to nothing, move nothing, think nothing, let the world and its worries wash over you, as if you didn't exist.¹ What are worries to the dead?

What they don't explain to the uninitiated: five-thousand years of Hindu wisdom has never been able to invent a harder pose than savasana. Without the luxury of burning hamstrings and streaming sweat, we lie there defenseless. The worrisome chatter, the amazing demon², resentful at having been put off for an hour, plunges into the corpse like a carrion bird; after that relative respite of its only tearing at your muscles, now it comes back to tear at your mind.

The reason the yogis save savasana for the end of class: savasana is hard.

1. Since I'm going "New Age" with this post, I'll recommend this, for another take on pretending you're dead.

2. To help offset the New Agey-ness: "Amazing Demon" is my Wu Tang name.

Puer Aeternus 

or, the Adult Struggle With the Paradise of Childhood

There's a dormant neglected child inside me, wailing, beating on a drum, beating his way out. "You poor pollywog," this drummer boy calls me. "You piece of half-freak. You sad stuck-in-between, only partway misshapen. I am misshapen. I'm grotesque; I'm irresponsible; I'm disgusting; I'm selfish and careless and I cry and whine and shriek, and my shriek can shatter glass. And your world is glass and glass is made to be shattered...

"Keep me close to your heart (or I'll eat it)."

Phenomena / Noumena 

Through a murky fog I can almost make out the shape of two worlds where I'd thought there was a single one.

The first, the clearer, more concrete of the two, is verdant with gratifying things: simple good things like good coffee, good music, good conversation with good people. Life in this world is easy, as if there's little gravity. This is the world we see and hear, the world we live in.

The second, concurrent world is harder to make out through the haze, heavier, full of things that are impossibly hard to hold—unattainable things—happiness, contentment, love. This is the world we know but can't see, the world where longing lives. ¹

The two worlds seem almost to overlap, but in fact never touch; and no quantity of the simple things can add up to even a single one of the unattainable ones. We collect our things, but in the end it's as if we have nothing at all...

(How antimonious.)

1. Kant would probably not have considered "love" in his proof of transcendental idealism -- but shouldn't he have? This is knowledge we have, a priori, more than any morality or mathematics: "How do you know if you're in love?" "You just know." Etc.

Coathanger Lobotomy 

I'd pay a couple dollars for a homemade lobotomy if I just knew "a guy". Instead I try the same with a whiskey bottle (it costs more) and contemplate getting another tattoo, an effect which, if not therapeutic, will at least last longer than the whiskey.

I'd pay up to $20 for anyone who could rig me up to an electrical outlet for homemade electroshock, but you'd have to promise it wouldn't leave telltale scars on my temples.

A mentor writes me recently, "I remember your Buddha-bliss-extended smile, the blue eyes, the great gaze and the brilliant mind, which, I am sure, has only become more infinite with time."

If I wanted to flatter myself, I suppose, yes, I could chalk up everything going on in my head to the "infinitude" of my "brilliant" mind. Sure. Whatever.

In practice, I have neither the math nor the religion for such thinking. Grab me a coathanger.

An Inconvenient Syllogism 

Now that Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, the right half of the blogosphere is making a lot of noise about how the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the people who select the recipient of the peace prize, is "anti-Bush."

Call me simple, but isn't that because Bush is "anti-peace"?

Experiments in Magnetic Poetry (pt. 2) 

(Try it.)

My Friend Tom 

Today I had a long meeting with my friend Tom. I first saw him from across a courtyard, and though he looked more or less same as always, for some reason I didn't recognize him. I'm forced to consider it's less because of changes that have taken place with Tom than the ones that have taken place inside me.

[Among the rules of the ocean: you can't swim against a riptide, and you can't position yourself inside a sea change. When everything's moving, it's hard to judge where you are. Focus on far-away points and try to triangulate...]

I like Tom, and just seeing him made it a better day than it would have been otherwise. Tom's one of my favorites.

* * *

After the meeting, I got back to Brooklyn but wasn't ready to go home. I took a detour to Boerum Hill, to a bar I keep meaning to check out. I had four drinks and paid for two: safe to say, it's my new favorite bar. The bartender, a friendly stocky quirky fellow, felt like long-lost kin. We argued with some people at the far end of the bar about socialism. He kept my bowl of peanuts full. His name was Tom. When I said "Goodbye," he replied, "See you soon."

Yes, you will.

* * *

The last stop on my way home was impulsive: I stopped at a local convenience store to buy a plant. I'm sure this had as much to do with those four whiskeys as with my own persistent sentimentality about flora. On my way out of the store, I walked by the ever-present homeless man who has claimed full squatter's rights on this stretch of pavement. I see this man every recent day of my life, but I've never spoken with him, and he's never asked me for anything. He is a panhandler of the most unobtrusive kind. And probably for that exact reason, I walked back to him and gave him the contents of my wallet.

He laughed. "I don't ask people for money, so when they give it to me, I know it's because they want to. " I talked to him for the next twenty minutes. I might have set out just to assuage my bourgeois guilt, but instead I made a friend.

His name's Tom.

God of Small (White) Things 

Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited (like all of Wes Anderson's films, to greater or lesser degrees) is like a dollhouse made of marzipan: it's delicate, sweet, and of questionable substance that's neither fulfilling nor structurally sound. You simultaneously want to protect it, admire its preciousness, and crush it to hear the satisfying thunk of its fragility.

That's to say, then, it's everything we've come to expect of Anderson's films, and everything we love about them, and everything that drives us nuts, too. (No pun intended.)

Critics have been piling on Darjeeling Limited, eager to knock Anderson's hipster specs sideways:

Like his peers Zach Braff, Noah Baumbach (who directed the excellent Squid and the Whale and co-wrote Life Aquatic), and Sofia Coppola (whose brother Roman helped write Darjeeling Limited), Wes Anderson situates his art squarely in a world of whiteness: privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored, fusty. He's wise enough to make fun of it here and there, but in the end, there's something enamored and uncritical about his attitude toward the gaffes, crises, prejudices, and insularities of those he portrays. In The Darjeeling Limited, he burrows even further into this world, even (especially?) as the story line promises an exotic escape. Hands down, it's his most obnoxious movie yet. (Jonah Weiner for Slate, "Unbearable Whiteness.")

Weiner falls short of calling Anderson racist outright, but I won't shy from the word: parts of Darjeeling made me cringe and try to hide my own white face under my hoodie.

But I have no intention of joining the critical pile-on, either. For obvious (and probably defensive) reasons, I take issue with the implication that privileged, bookish woebegones with white skin don't have stories worth watching. And I absolutely reject his conflation of Anderson's perspectives with the films of Noah Baumbach and Sofia Coppola, which I think, for all their own whiteness, are churning full of blood and guts. Anderson's movie about Americans soul-searching in an "exotic" land becomes an essay on cleverness, true; but Coppola's version of the same story, Lost in Translation, is exquisite and heartful.

Weiner also misses the fact that there's something elusively magical about the worlds of Wes Anderson: for all their preciousness (and "unbearable whiteness"), they induce another feeling that offsets the queasiness: wonder. Anderson's gift is his ability to make us marvel (and laugh) at things that would otherwise be mundane. He reminds us there's life to be found, everywhere, and it's rich and complex—even when it's made of white confection.

Experiments in Magnetic Poetry (pt. 1) 

Red No. 32 

more product (RED)

Toward the End of iLife 

For months now, my aged iPod had been dying a slow death, unlike anything I'd ever seen. Considering the years I spent in hospice care for iPods, that's saying something. Mine had taken on symptoms of a previously unknown terminal disease, and my meager medicine could do nothing to save it—only make its last days comfortable.

The iPod, old, scarred, fat, rough around the edges, had nonetheless been a stalwart workhorse, and we'd been through the wars together. He was moody, petulant sometimes, but he knew how to talk to me, and vice versa; and he had a playlist to suit my every mood. (Which means many.)

Then he got a little fussy. He seemed to disagree with my taste in music, and sometimes refused to play songs, no matter how I insisted. Every now and then, he'd chirp and hiss with purely analog sounds, sounds we haven't heard since selling our turntable to that pawn shop on Melrose.

Then, like a cantankerous old man, the iPod got reclusive and antisocial—wouldn't talk to my computer at all. "You've got plenty of music on here already," he growled. "What need for any more? (Kids today...)"

So the collection of music on the iPod was now permanent. (If I'd known, if I'd only gotten some warning, I might have been a little more careful before loading up the Avril Lavigne, the John Cougar, the Motley Crüe, the annoying John Cage opera... But we never see the end coming: we always assume there will be more time...)

Toward the end, the iPod got belligerent, actually mean: he'd send electrical shocks through the headphones without warning or reason. Maybe it was spite. Maybe like an old man passing gas—out of his control, or simply to remind us he's in the room, not to be forgotten, not dead yet. We'll never know which.

Product (RED) 

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Napoleon, Retreating from Moscow 

"There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous."

Working from Home 

I'm new to it, and I'm certainly not going to say that I'd prefer waking every morning to fight my way through the subway en route to the proverbial water cooler. But it occurs to me...

Am I just cutting out one-quarter of my life's excitement?

I + NY 

I thought as soon as I moved, I'd transform into a prolific blogger. But all the unpacking, all the accessory shopping, all the negotiations with the utility companies, (all the heat and humidity,) and all the enjoyment of being back in New York have gotten in the way.

(Not counting the weather), it's good here. I feel tension lift off me one layer at a time—like exfoliating the soul. Soon, I think (and once the heat breaks), I'll be hitting the pavement to offer up some fresh Sherpa-ing.

Change of Address 

I find these "change of address" messages a little embarrassing.  If I'd just stayed in better touch to begin with, then you'd already know all about my recent move from Boston back to Brooklyn.  You'd already know that I moved into an almost too-big apartment on a sleepy street, not too far from the water, that I share the place with my sister and my brother-in-law, and that we see each other just enough and not too much.  You'd know that I worked out a "telecommute" with the job I've had for the last two years, as an "interactive producer" for some big fancy websites, mostly for a bunch of NGOs and other do-gooders.  You'd know that I'd been planning this move for nearly a year, and you'd know how much happier I am here than there.  You'd know that I'm now two miles (instead of two-hundred) from the "love of my life", and you'd know that even though I put that phrase in quotes, I really mean it.  (You'd know the picture I attached looks mostly like me, though I guess I'd like to think my forehead isn't quite that big...)  You'd know that it makes me happy to have so many good friends scattered throughout the country and the world, even if I'm not so good at staying in touch with them; and you'd know too that it would make me happy to hear from them, even though I won't think any less of them if they don't manage to reply.  And now you do know all of these things.

Much love,
Chris

How cellophane 

Sometimes it's as though the aliens are reaching out to us, or the dolphins—if only we knew how to hear them... This fell into my spam folder this morning, from "Cherie", with the subject heading, i'm sad chris:

Is ransom buddha the gravid enthusiasm melee or galatea enthusiasm?

The micronesia detonate not mardi but luxuriant matsumoto rawhide and genevieve afterword. Sometimes buttery is eddy but gravid, glandular ah adsorb scot tacitus dunkirk prelude servitor!

How cellophane? aitken! afterword dreamlike keenan rawhide!

Is cousin diatomaceous the agony cloture deck or superfluous handstand?

The blythe rubble not cloture but aminobenzoic boson bound and rawhide handstand. Sometimes andiron is agony but blythe, token aspheric describe cepheus contradict urea cyril drown!

How totalitarian? iniquity! maggoty toenail lathe goof!

I want to help, Cherie. I hear you. Sometimes buttery is gravid. How totalitarian.

Cherie—I'm sad, too...

Boot-Strapping 

"When something is empty, fill it. When something is full, empty it. When you have an itch, scratch it." - Dieter Dengler's advice to his shipmates, upon his rescue

There's a moment in Werner Herzog's new film, Rescue Dawn, when, after weeks of planning their escape from a prisoner of war camp in Laos, the characters played by Christian Bale and Steve Zahn finally spring (or in this case, crawl) into action—and immediately after, Zahn's character seizes up and vomits: the stress, anticipation and fear have overwhelmed his already-unsteady digestive system. In that moment, facing the unknown on an upset stomach, maybe it actually seemed preferable to him to stay in the camp. Bale (whose character has that obsessive singularity of purpose typical of Herzog's heroes) literally has to drag his friend through his own vomit toward freedom.

I'm not in a prisoner of war camp in Laos; I'm at a cafe in Boston. But I am days away from my own escape, which is months in the planning; and today, I woke up and vomited.

How typical. My body's pitched efforts to sabotage the pursuit of my own happiness have always struck me as anti-Darwinian: I have an itch, and I'd scratch it if only I weren't so anxious. Trying to lift one's self from an unhappy place to a happy place necessarily requires some amount of boot-strapping—but why is it always these moments when the laces threaten to break?¹

It occurs to me that if Rescue Dawn had been made by, say, Terrence Malick instead of Werner Herzog, then Dieter would have "escaped" from Laos through daydreams, imaginations, and voice-over—more escapism than escape.² Dieter would have fantasized about his various possible alternate lives without bothering to save his actual one. But the people who face life's stresses with escapism aren't the ones who get their lives told in movies. No—they're the ones who go watch movies in the midst of the afternoon, when they should instead be packing, and preparing for their great escape...

1. Because these are the moments when the laces are under the most strain. Duh.

2. I suppose Terrence Malick already made such a movie...

Seven Days 

"All signs are pointing to a fantastic new beginning for you—and a long journey or another sort of geographical change could be coming soon. If a trip is already planned, expect it to go incredibly well—an upgrade may be involved. Prepare yourself for unexpected luxury."

Independents Day 

"Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."

- from the "Indictment" of the Declaration of Independence

First, a sincere thank you to our President and Commander-in-Chief, for giving his largely complacent electorate a good reason to review the wise words of our Forefathers on this Fourth of July holiday: when George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence of his staffer Scooter Libby, he offered a clear reminder why we had to shuck off monarchy in the first place: because it breeds cronyism and corruption. The President refused to assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

Second, a sincere thank you to Keith Olbermann, for being brave, lucid, and for being a true patriot and independent—that is, thanks for reminding us what we're celebrating today.

"Democracy doesn't mean much if people have to confront concentrated systems of economic power as isolated individuals. Democracy means something if people can organize to gain information, to have thoughts for that matter, to make plans, to enter into the political system in some active way, to put forth programs and so on. If organizations of that kind exist, then democracy can exist too. Otherwise it's a matter of pushing a lever every couple of years; it's like having the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola."

-Noam Chomsky, Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences (1985)

Sixteen Days (Exhibit B) 

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Sixteen Days (Exhibit A) 

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"Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign" 

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Upon a Time 

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Not Something You Think Every Day (Hopefully) 

Sunset in Boston, pt. 2 

or, Location Location Location

It's not too early, I think, for me to start trying to puzzle out what went wrong here: I want to try and find some answers during this "liminal" time, before I start whatever the next thing is, so when I pack my things here, I have a better idea what I should leave behind. ¹

I'm in Harvard Square, sitting halfway between a busker playing classical guitar and another on bagpipes. ("Why can't we all just get along?") I remember a couple different occasions, thinking I'd be happier if I lived over here in this neighborhood, instead of where I do live. When I re-upped my lease there (slightly under duress...), I remember a friend here told me I'd "shot myself in the foot," that I'd ruined my chance to enjoy Boston by staying in that stodgy part of town.

Now, a year later, the bagpipes bleating in my left ear and the guitar twanging in my right, and surrounded by all of the beautiful smart optimistic people strolling (shopping) in Harvard Square, it's easy to imagine how things might have been better. But in the end, I don't know if it would have made a difference where I was, if I'd had this same temperament: I would have had better places to be alone. It all would have been more tolerable but I think in the end just as wrong. For whatever reason, blame it on me or the town, almost nothing here affects me, influences me, alters me, or inspires me to grow. ² A change of neighborhood might have helped, but only if I'd let it, and I don't have any reason to think I would have, since I'd decided all that time ago that I wasn't going to let it.

Then, I wonder at the things I'll miss when I'm gone. I'd try to make the list now—the barrista I like but never got to know, the long walks through the Fens, this classical guitarist on my right—but the most poignant items on the list, I'm sure I won't even be able to predict. So like me to claim to loathe a thing for the entire time I have it, and to pine for it the day it's gone.

1. That means this blog will become even more shapeless and self-indulgent than usual—though my intent to keep it from getting too shapeless and self-indulgent is exactly what's made it "usual" for me not to post at all...

2. I have the image here that a good, middle-class consumer is like a well-pruned shrub, alive and well-enough but not at all growing or only in the ways it's allowed by the "gardener."

Sunset in Boston 

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Having Cake Versus Eating It 

When does anyone ever, ever have cake without eating it too? I thought that's what having cake was...

End of an Era 

Or, Why I Should Mind My Own Beeswax

I swore to lay off the blog till something changed. No point in rehashing the same sad story over and over and over and over and... Well, my friends: the time has come. Something momentous is going on, and tomorrow will not be the same as yesterday. And I'll tell you why.

But first—Hi. How've you been? (Hey, it's not a rhetorical question: go ahead and leave a "comment." ) Does the Summer of '07 find you looking happily upon your life? Do you feel wiser and more comfortable in your own skin, even if that skin doesn't look as young as it used to? Does the cool of the breeze that rustles the trees rustle you too?

[Bear with me: I'm still working out the kinks in my atrophied blog-muscles.]

So, on to my big news. It'd be safe to say I've been in a bit of a rut these past few weeks months years. So many symptoms I could describe, but I'll pick out this one: the gray t-shirts. Every day for two years, I've worn jeans and a gray t-shirt. Actually, that's not quite true: I have, every now and then, swapped in a different shirt, though it's more out of necessity than fashion statement: my stock of gray tees has limits; and even on these days, I pick a shirt that's a deep enough blue that from the distance or at twilight, I'm sure it'd pass for gray.

This morning I hauled a 40-pound laundry bag of jeans and gray tees down to the laundromat, and dropped in so many quarters I thought I might hit a jackpot. And I did, in a manner of speaking. Because in (at least) one of those pair of jeans was a stick of lip balm, which heated in the dryer and melted all over my entire blue-and-gray wardrobe.

The result was, I'm sure you can imagine, greasy, sticky, and kind of sweet smelling.

Safe to say, I won't be wearing a gray shirt tomorrow. End of an era. But what should I wear...?

Terminal B 

The literal definition of utopia is "no place." A place that doesn't exist. Nowhere.

That's where I am.

It's not where I set out to go when I got in the cab. I told the driver to take me to the airport. But now that I'm here, an hour before my flight, I realize there's nowhere ("no place") I'd rather be: it's well-lit, relatively quiet, and it's a place that's simultaneously new (I've never been to this terminal) and also completely familiar: I can find my way around like an old hand, and I know all of the place's cultures and etiquettes: I put my keys in the tray and take off my shoes without even being asked.

The hour before the flight, having put aside all of the anxieties of "Will I miss my plane?", is pure luxury: free time that doesn't exist on any calendar, spent in a location that is between places—nowhere. Everything is artificial, in relation to my "real" life—and since our "real" lives are mostly constructed, a break from that construction, an hour at the airport, might be the more real of the two.

* * *

Yesterday, walking to work, I saw a billboard of the Marlboro Man. I haven't seen these around much lately: Big Tobacco's changing tactics must have the iconic cowboy on the lam, hiding out in caves or whatever. So this billboard image of the rugged, unshaven, weather-worn cowboy struck me in a way I don't think it ever had: I'd become un-numbed to it, and it had become unfamiliar and regained some of its original power.

In that moment, I dreamt about a life in the outdoors of the High Plains, sun and rain on my face, unfettered by walls or cities or clocks or any of the constructs with which I've chosen to self-identify—without my job or apartment, without my family or friends or hobbies or skills. I too could be horseback, wearing a chamois and a wide brim hat, drawing on a cigarette, with wild horses and snow-capped mountains behind me.

At that moment, I saw (as I sometimes see, as we probably all sometimes see) the entire set of things which I choose to define myself as if they were arrayed on a lattice, and through the framework of this lattice, I saw the Marlboro Man. The lattice—its pieces collectively adding up to what I call My Life—was designed (consciously? unconsciously?) to provide structure, strength, and stability. A cage whose bars could keep chaotic reality at bay, in favor or something calmer, more stable, and less real. Nonetheless, a cage.

"That's silly, I don't even smoke." And continued my walk to work. Like now I continue up the causeway to my plane.

Food Court 

I'm in a food court.

The inventor of the food court should get some kind of Congressional medal, because I can't think of anything that better encapsulates the way Americans live: crowds of people, some with families and some alone, half-sitting / half-standing, on a break from work or from shopping, hurriedly eating various passable innocuous meals, everyone getting exactly what they want (sort of) without having had to agree or accommodate each other's taste.

(Are there pastimes other than working and shopping?)

The food court has so many nations represented, it feels like the Olympics: China, India, Mexico, Japan, Vermont. It feels like the United Nations.

(I'll bet they have an amazing food court at the United Nations...)

Actually, the U.N. could learn a few things from this food court, because people seem to be getting along amazingly and putting aside their petty national concerns for the sake of the greater good (fast food): the Koreans are cooking the Mexican food, Mexicans work at the Chinese place, the Chinese work at the Kashmiri Buffet.

It's beautiful.

"We are the world."

Incontrovertible 

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The Internet is Evil 

or, the Tragic Pleasure of Pity and Fear 2.0

I've said it before and I'll say it again: in a world as big as ours, I'm amazed people are even as nice to each other as they are. That's why I find Web 2.0 and all of its resultant buzzwords so encouraging: all of this "social networking" is making us "collectively intelligent," and helping us find our "affiliations" on the "long tail."

So why is it, every time I surf the Internet, I find people socially networking at one another's expense? I found this clip the other day, from a British radio show—something I'd never have found before Web 2.0.

I've played it over and over and I can't stop: it offers too many kinds of awful, all in one place, to turn away.

This is high drama of the Internet Age, with all the formal structures of classic tragedy—her squeaky expectant hope ("What sort of ring?") shows a kind of innocent nobility, but is followed immediately by the reveal of her tragic flaw ("How much is it worth?"); then, the drawn-out anticipation of the episode ("I'm so in love with him... I can't wait to get married and have babies."), and finally the terrible reversal and recognition: she's knocked speechless by the radio host ("Wha-?"), and stays on the line while pilloried across Yorkshire and the World Wide Web—"Everyone knows you're a dirty little tart."

But for all the spectacle of this poor girl's tragedy, don't forget to save some pathos for the boyfriend (who chose to end a four-year "perfect" relationship not with a conversation, but instead via a radio show proxy), and for the radio DJ, too, who has made this his life's work.

If the power of catharsis comes in part from fear that these events could befall us, as well as the protagonist, then I am afraid of playing any of these roles, and this is cathartic times three.

Snow Job, pt. 2 

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Snow Job 

This is a dark chapter in our history. Whatever else happens, our country's international standing has been frittered away by people who don't have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works. America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment. If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference.
- retired U.S. general and Joint Chief of Staff Tony McPeak, from Rolling Stone magazine

The pattern this week was disappointingly, and expectedly, familiar:

1. A scandal broke in the Bush Administration. In this case, it was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' mass firings of federal prosecutors, not for incompetency as originally claimed, but because they weren't "loyal Bushies."
2. Tony Snow, Bush's press secretary, denied any White House involvement (as did Gonzales, under oath).
3. Almost immediately thereafter, hard evidence revealed this to be a bald-faced lie. (This time, an email memo showed the idea originated in the White House, and, as tends to be the case in these now-frequent situations, sprung from Bush's "brain", Karl Rove.)

My disenchantment is tempered only by my exhaustion. When will the "compassionate conservatives," who represent the "moral majority" on a platform of "family values", stop lying to us?

"Mistakes were made."

Indeed.

There's something about the Bush Administration that has me reach for my old developmental psychology textbook. (Repeatedly.)

I suppose it's for the simple reason that they keep behaving like children.

Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

Psychologist Lawrence Kolhberg charted six distinct stages of moral development, as we grow from children to adults, to help understand why children might lie when it's not really in their best interest, why adults might tell the truth when it's not really in their best interest, and, by extrapolation, why politicians are so consistently full of shit.

Of the six stages, the first two are mostly the realm of childhood and can be summed as "What's in it for me?" The second two are associated generally with teens, who are learning to conform to the larger society by holding steadfast (sometimes too steadfast) to its rules. The fifth stage requires considering other people's points of view, to achieve compromise and ascertain the largest good; this stage is considered the basis for democracy. And the sixth stage is almost entirely hypothetical, in which a higher abstract sense of justice rules unconditionally, and regardless of particular consequences in specific instances.

Though the Bush Administration's rhetoric implies high moral principles, its aversion to any kind of compromise situate it, morally, somewhere below Stage Five. And its disregard for popular vote (reflected in poll numbers) and rule of law (reflected in Gonzales' own illegal wire-tapping) indicate a maturity somewhere below Stages Three or Four.

So is Bush's moral compass Stage One, or Stage Two? I'm not very clear on the distinction between these two "pre-conventional" stages; after all, most of us were in grade school when we passed out of them. But here's a definition of Stage One, from Wikipedia, which seems to fit:

In stage one, individuals focus on the direct consequences that their actions will have for themselves. For example, an action is perceived as morally wrong if the person who commits it gets punished. The worse the punishment for the act is, the more 'bad' the act is perceived to be. In addition, there is no recognition that others' points of view are any different from one's own view.

This stage may be viewed as a kind of authoritarianism.

Which is to say that our executive office is in need of a good spanking. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

Perchance To 

or, the Ids of March (part three)

Have I told you about the dreams?

Probably I haven't.¹ Or I'll mention one every now and then because it's quirky or interesting or entertaining; I'll make passing reference to that "action-adventure dream" or the "dream where I had no arms," and you'll say, "Wow! That's intense!"

You have no idea.

That's the warm-up act. That's the sneak preview.

Between midnight and 8am, it's a grindhouse, a grotesque opera, a ballet of the deformed. My id gallops whole herds of nightmares roughshod through my head. Just this week, I drowned in a riptide, commanded an army of elephants into battle, put holes in my throat with a Swiss Army knife awl, rode a Third World bus knowing it carried a bomb set to explode, and the finale, last night, when I was held captive, locked in a closet with two other men by a mime who sometimes got in a mood to reach his black-gloved hand through a hole in the closet door, and slash at us with his butcher knife, while we crawled over one another trying to hide from the invisible blows. Yes, a mime.

If you think I look tired when I come to work in the morning, well, I am. At the water cooler: "What did you do last night?" I've been drowned, war-ravaged, blown to bits, cut up, and exhausted with fear. How about you?

Shelley: "A dream has the power to poison sleep."

Last week, I slit my throat for no reason at all, almost on a whim, almost by accident. I used a serrated knife, and it hurt more than I expected. But rather than die, I became invisible to others, and with no throat, I couldn't speak—so I was speechless, bloodless, unseen, and alone for the rest of my days.

The week before, I dreamt up a sexy psychiatrist. (I never said my dreams were subtle or hard to read...) She told me wanted to press me into a book like a butterfly, for her collection. To "save" me.

"Dreaming," said sleep expert William C. Dement, "permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." Well, it's not on account of my waking hours that I claim to be the craziest person you know.

I've told you that I miss you, that I miss falling asleep next to you, I miss seeing you when I wake. What I haven't told you till now is that when you're with me, I don't dream. Not one bit.

1. I have told you about the dreams—here, here, and every March 15th...

Hyper-Mourning 

Introduction (by Way of Harry Potter)

My sister and I have quite a few separate theories about how Severus Snape isn't really evil and how Dumbledore isn't really dead. We've argued these at length, including specific textual citations, but I think deep down we know the truth, that he actually is dead and gone. I think we just can't face our own sadness at our loss: denial, they say, is the first stage of grief. Dumbledore is dead. Long live Dumbledore.

Now, this week, I'm dealing with two new shocking deaths and finding them hard to accept. I wake up feeling empty, and immediately set my brain upon inventing scenarios that might offer an alternate understanding of these two events. I'm genuinely sad. I'm in mourning. And it's somewhat embarrassing to admit, because these two people aren't real.

Part One: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar

I've been mostly shielded from death in my life: my friends are, for the most part, thankfully alive and well; I was young when my grandparents died, and the relatives who have passed have mostly been distant—geographically if not genealogically. As a result, I've developed a (quite active, vivid) fear that when my loved ones do die, I won't know how to react, that I'll react inappropriately, or, emotionally short-circuited, having no practice at the mechanism for processing these things, I'll react with no emotion whatsoever.

Real-life death is part of a natural cycle, predictable even when it's surprising, and meaningless. Sad, but not meaningful. Fictional death, though, is intentional and not-at-all arbitrary: some (malicious?) writer wills each and every death. To look for meaning in the death of a real person is futile; to look for meaning in the death of a fictional character is simply reading.

So I'm not embarrassed to admit that fictional death leaves me sobbing, metaphysically soul-searching and pulling my beard. Fiction, in all of its forms, is a emotional training ground for real life, a chance to practice at experiences that will (hopefully) be rare in our own lives. A safe place to try out mourning.

That is what I've been doing since last week, when Starbuck died. ¹

Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the derring-do fighter jock of the Sci Fi network's TV series Battlestar Galactica, was probably the show's most interesting character, carrying the series on her emotionally-unstable shoulders till exploding her ship like a Roman candle last week. The episode purported to be dealing with "Kara Thrace and her special destiny" (an idea the character herself mocked, saying it "sounds like a bad cover band"). I'm not at all clear, though, what was so special about her destiny: in the end, it didn't connect any plot points, offer any new insight, or have a higher end. Her destiny was simply to die meaninglessly, which isn't special at all.² It happens all the time. It happens, eventually, to each one of us.

So, in addition to the feelings of sadness and loss that accompany death, this fictional death opened up a third uncomfortable feeling, which was that this fictional (and therefore ordered) universe has no meaning.

Battlestar Galactica has always been more about faith than flying spaceships, and I was suddenly losing mine in its writers.³ As with their shocking second-season finale (when they turned the show inside-out by landing their entire fleet on a planet), this recent episode has me wondering:

Has Battlestar Galactica (hyper)jumped the shark?

Maybe they'll surprise me. Maybe Kara Thrace will have a special destiny after all, to take some of the sting out of the sadness...

Part Two: The Map Preceding the Territory

I'd barely had time to begin processing the loss of this first fictional character when I learned of the passing of another: French philosopher Jean Baudrillard died this week.

Ostensibly, Baudrillard was a real person⁴, though not to me personally: I never knew him and have probably spent more time (and better time) with Starbuck. Baudrillard occupied the same space as celebrities, situated closer to fiction than reality—so his death seems to me to belong more to the former than the latter, just like his life. My only connection to Baudrillard were the books themselves, which won't be significantly altered by the passing of the man. As if there should be a bumper sticker: "French philosophers don't die; they just get reissued." Baudrillard is dead; long live Baudrillard.

1. I realize I'm outing myself as an even bigger dork than most of you probably already imagine any time I so much as make reference to Battlestar Galactica—let alone admit it sometimes makes me cry. And on the subject of dorkiness, though I feel some urge to apologize for maybe spoiling this surprise plot twist, I'll have you know I myself discovered before I'd seen the show, by watching a headline pop up on the Digg "Swarm"—"Is Starbuck Really Dead?" That's how I found out.

2. That her final hours were guided by a cylon "Ghost of Christmas Past" doesn't make the death any more meaningful.

3.Writers who will no doubt be applauded for their "bravery" in taking this unconventional turn, as though throwing out the baby with the bath water is brave. It remains to be seen whether or not their baby will be reborn, i.e. in the bath water of a "resurrection ship"...

4. As real at least as the Gulf War.

Return to the Valley of the Blogs 

It went above freezing today and I decided it was time to come out of hibernation. Winter's over, according to Punxsutawney Phil and the people at Microsoft (who had us downloading software patches, to avoid a Y2K07 bug...). It's time for a spring awakening.

I'd gotten tired of blogging. I'd gotten tired of the narrow whining that had started to pass for blogging: "Wah wah wah. I live in Boston now and it doesn't feel like home. I'll just watch TV or play videogames till I get out of here. And on days I'm really bored, I'll write about it."

How fun for all of us.

I decided there wasn't any reason to blog until something changed, and I had something to blog about. And, well, there's a little fallacy there, of course: things are always changing ... but if I don't write about them, I generally fail to notice. Like for instance, since my last blog entry, I got a new computer, a new pair of glasses, a new cellphone provider, new boots, and a new filling in a wisdom tooth. Oh, and a new apartment in New York—did I tell you? So I suppose things are changing...

Bardo 

or, Brush Up on Your Buddhism, pt. 1

For no reason, I've been waking around dawn, so that without any planning, I've managed to see the sun rise every day of this new year – the anticipation of the day ready to begin, but not quite. If the day is when things happen, then I've been witness to the time just before.

And that is how I feel.

Buddhism describes a "bardo" as a temporary, transitory state – a time between things. According to this tradition, our entire lives are a bardo state, the Bardo of Existence, followed by the Bardo of Dying and the Bardo of Rebirth. Because, in each of these states, we are not quite at one with our "true nature", a bardo is essentially a time of confusion, a time we spend learning the rules to a changing game that we grow to think of as "reality."

And that is how I feel.

There are bardos within bardos; I am in the Bardo of Boston, during which I form a set of hopes and dreams that will quickly be made irrelevant as I move into another transient place; since we never know when we will move from one bardo to another, all we can do is prepare, and also learn to accept the transience of things, and confusion.

And that, too, is how I feel…

Happy new year.